Directed by: Wojciech Smarzowski
Starring: Agata Turkot, Tomasz Schuchardt, Agata Kulesza
Rating: ★★★★☆
Measuring the real world impact of fiction is difficult, but sometimes a film makes a difference. In Poland, reports of domestic abuse tripled last November after the release of Dom dobry (Home Sweet Home) by Wojciech Smarzowski, according to the Feminoteka Foundation. The surge wasn’t accidental: the film’s promotional materials prominently featured the Niebieska Linia helpline, turning awareness into action.
Smarzowski’s films offer a deliberately distorted mirror, exposing Poland’s vices much as he did in both versions of The Wedding. From the silent complicity of police in Traffic Department (2012) to the corrupt churchmen of Clergy (2018), audiences continue to reward him, even if many would rather not face the reality surrounding them. With Home Sweet Home, he confronts another uncomfortable truth, violence against women.
Home Sweet Home initially plays like a light, head-over-heels romcom featuring political adviser Grzesiek (Tomasz Schuchardt) and Kaśka (Agata Turkot), who rush into living together without much thought. Smarzowski even embraces a vaguely Gondryesque style, using flashbacks and lowfidelity footage from the couple’s holidays at the seaside and in Venice to heighten the illusion.
Those seemingly tender, raw-looking moments are exactly where the first signs of coercion—and of both physical and psychological violence—begin to creep into Grzesiek and Kaska’s relationship. Smarzowski hints at this with sharp subtlety, letting viewers sense the danger before they fully see it. The lofi style becomes a crack in the film’s surface, signalling that something darker is unfolding.
Home Sweet Home gives Turkot the kind of breakthrough role most actors hope for when they move into cinema. The Polish actress rewards Smarzowski’s trust with a performance that is a trove of nuances, especially in the way she instinctively shields herself from a trauma she has yet to grasp. To find a female character this tormented and diminished in Smarzowski’s work, one has to look back to Agata Kulesza in the director’s other non-satirical project, the “Masovian western” Rose (2011). Fittingly, Kulesza appears here as Kaśka’s mother.
Turkot’s impact also comes from her onscreen chemistry with Schuchardt, arguably the actor of the moment in Polish cinema. He recently played another abusive figure, a domineering theatre coach, in Korek Bojanowski’s Loss of Balance (2024). In his recent films, Smarzowski continues to expose police silence, and in this film he targets the broader institutional indifference toward cases involving “women who bruise easily”.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on January 11, 2026